 Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. My goodness, a warm welcome like that. You must have gotten here too late to read the morning papers. Hey, they have not any special story. They just have a tone to them. But, well, I welcome you to the White House, and I want to, incidentally, I try to stay out of sight coming down the hall there. I'm too visible here, and I don't know what I interrupted. You were probably making a good point. I should have. I'm going to find a way to sneak in. But I want to thank Trent Lott and Mike Oxley for making this possible and for inviting you all to be here. I thank them for that, but I'm grateful for more than that, because I'm grateful to the two of them for the stalwart help they've been in what we've been trying to do here in these last couple of years. And I don't know what we'd do without them. So you just make a promise in your heart right now that they'll be around a long time. I know that you've had a lot of speeches, and I'd probably be plowing the same ground if I tried to say anything. And maybe some of the tone has been about the improving economic situation in the country. I am most optimistic and confident in view of all of the economic indicators that we are on the road back. I think I've just come back from being out in the countryside myself, and I think there's a whole tone of optimism out there in the country. But I think one of the most obvious signs and indicators of recovery is the fact that up on the Hill, our critics aren't calling it Reaganomics anymore. That was their word. They coined it for our economic program when they didn't think it was good to work. And they decided and said already they were pronouncing that it hadn't worked, and I hadn't signed the bill yet to put it into effect. But now the very fact that they're not using that anymore, I don't know what name they'll come up with, or they'll try to find a way. But I wouldn't just, I know I've only got a few minutes here because they schedule me. That's the only thing I haven't discovered in these two and a half years. Who puts that paper on my desk every morning that tells me what I'm going to be doing every 15 minutes. But back in that other life of mine, we once had a study with regard to the motion picture business that revealed that in spite of our trailers and spite of our billboards and all the advertising that the picture business did, the single greatest factor in the success of a movie was word of mouth. Neighbors talking to neighbors, somebody saying what they had seen the night before and so forth. And I'd like to talk to you for just a second about word of mouth. There are an awful lot of distortions. I was kind of joking on the level here at the beginning. There are a lot of distortions about what's going on in Washington, what we're doing. Probably one of the most obvious is in all of our efforts to reduce government spending. So far, all we've been doing is reducing the increase in spending. And about 70% of that, as your host here, Mike Oxley and Trent Lott, know, is built in by previous legislation and pattern into the government. And yet, we keep hearing from special interest groups about our budget cuts and how terrible things are getting to be because of the cuts that we have made. A budget in just about everything is bigger now than it was before. Only it isn't as much bigger as it would have been if they had stuck around in charge. Last night, the reason I mention this is last night, I got frustrated watching one of the network news accounts. And they were going on about hunger in the land and food stamps and so forth. And they were citing the difficulty of people now no mention of the fact that inflation, which when we came here, was 12.4% for the last six months, has been running at less than one half of 1%. And that's the lowest six month period of inflation in 22 years. So they must be a little better off in that regard. But this going on and harking back to a documentary that the same network had done several years ago on hunger in this country and which turned out, and later was revealed, there were some phony items in that particular documentary. The food stamps was their target last night. And they were indicating how the food stamps, even to the person getting the maximum amount, couldn't possibly buy the food they needed. They didn't add that those food stamps were only a supplement to other government benefits that people eligible for food stamps were receiving. And then they kept referring to it was our budget cuts that we had reduced. And now we wanted to reduce a billion dollars more. Well, the plain truth of the matter is that almost 4 million more people are getting food stamps than we're getting them in 1980. And we're spending almost $4 billion more for food stamps than we were spending in 1980. And the billion dollar cut they are talking about is simply a reduction in further increase in food stamp spending for the coming years, not a reduction below the present level or the previous levels. And the reason I mentioned that first part about word of mouth, I know you want to help or you wouldn't be here. And I know that you want the same things I think that we're all trying to achieve here. Don't forget the value of word of mouth, whether it's in the locker room after the 18th hole or whether it's just at a dinner with friends or at business or on the street or something in discussions. I hope you'll keep informed of what we're trying to do here, what some of the accomplishments have been, and by word of mouth refute these ridiculous charges that are drummed up either by the bureaucracies that administer some of the programs or by the special interests that benefit from them. You know, when the war was declared on poverty some years ago, I think the only poverty that that war eliminated was it created a permanent structure of upper middle class bureaucrats who will continue to live well only as long as they can convince the public that the problems of poverty still exist. And since they define poverty themselves, why they're sure that it'll always exist. It may exist with a couple of cars in the driveway, but it'll exist. And you can be confident of one thing, with regard to real need, with regard to real nutrition needs of people who otherwise couldn't afford it. No, we have not reduced those. Our government is buying 95 million meals a day in the United States. And we're providing subsidies for housing to some 10 million people. And the things that need doing, and particularly in these tough economic times, we're doing. And we believe that everyone in America does want to help where help is really needed. And the proof of that is, and then I'm going to wind up here because, yeah, that piece of paper. The proof of that is one of the things that we started when we first came here was I had a great belief in the private sector. And the private sector in this country, going clear back to the days when farmers built a barn for someone, if their barn burned down, and helped in harvesting their crop if there was illness on the part of a neighbor. All the old-fashioned things that we did and thought were just our neighborly duties. And it began to disappear as people more and more said, well, that's government's job. And began turning it over to government. What we created, as you know, a task force for private initiative, help. And for a year this task force was working. And it is unbelievable what has taken place at the private sector. And we have here in the White House now a computer. And in that computer are more than 3,000 programs where people at the community or state level have found a way, or even just individuals banding together, or businesses and industries, to solve some of the problems that we previously thought only government could solve. And we have, with those programs and the description of them, the names and the phone numbers of the people in charge, and thus any community or anyone with a community problem wants to find out if there is some solution to that. And contact us. And we're circulating the news about this. And we can put them in touch with the individuals who will tell them how this is done. There's a thing in Midland, Texas that's called Christmas in April. It's a tradition there. And every April 1st, people of all professions, volunteers, hundreds and hundreds of them, companies volunteer the building supplies that they need. And they then go out, and in that month of April, refurbish and repair, rebuild the homes of people that are either elderly or disabled or too poor, reinstall plumbing, rewire the houses, paint, do all the things that need doing. And just the other day on television so that I can give them credit for saying a nice thing too, I saw on a local news program here in Washington, they've heard about what's going on. And in Washington DC, there was a Christmas in April. And on the TV, there were judges, doctors and lawyers, businessmen, corporate executives, wives of the same, children of the same, in homes, dilapidated homes here in Washington, doing all those things. And they have adopted the name itself Christmas in April. The other day, some people from the medical profession called on me here, and before they left, I had to have a report and a list that long of small writing, because I write small, of all over the country, the county medical associations and separate individual medical groups, the ophthalmologists, so forth, who have organized programs of providing medical care free to those people who because of layoff, unemployment and so forth are no longer covered by company health insurance plans. And so their needs are being met at the private level by these people volunteering their services, these professionals. You name it, there's a program for it. And I just wanted you to know about that also because you can be very proud of what our people are doing. And along that line, you can be proud of something else. When we came here and then I'll quit. When we came here, as you know, we felt that the defense of our country, our national security, had been badly neglected. We weren't prepared for how badly neglected it had been. We found a lack of morale, a low quality in much of the people who were in our volunteer forces. That has been turned around. We have the highest level of high school graduates in this volunteer military now that we've ever had in the history of our military forces. We have, at average or above, intelligence, the highest percentage that we have ever had before. We have the highest re-enlistment rate that we have ever had. And the other day, I received a letter signed by about 100 Marines stationed in Italy. And they wrote me to tell me that if it would help the country for them not to have a cost of living pay raise or to go without a pay raise, they wanted me to know they were willing to do that and would be happy to cooperate if it would be of help, as I say, to their country. That's the kind of spirit that we now have there. And I can't think of anything more to tell you. But if you need any more information through Mike and Trent, you just ask for it, and we'll keep informed of what it is, and go and spread the word. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you so much for coming.